Categorie: Bespiegeling

Some years ago I bought the domain name GoHansBrinker.com because I wanted to start a website with personality-drive columns in English, next to my existing blog which could be found at several places on the web, but most importantly was present on the former XS4ALL Blogger platform.

The plan to write in English however never materialised, and I went on writing in Dutch (my actual native language) eventually using the GoHansBrinker.com domain for the Dutch languaged texts.

It is a bit difficult. I did several attempts to write these columns in English as well. And it is also not the problem that I don’t write in English just as easy as I do in Dutch (because I do), but plans in that direction always seem to fail on for example not wanting to estrange my Dutch readers (which really I do not want to do), and then in turn fail on the extra work to translate the texts in Dutch, to not let my usual readers look away.

Most Dutch people speak and understand English (and to a lesser account German) fairly well. But reading and writing is a lot more difficult, as is understanding small subtleties and things like reading some underlying connotation hidden between the lines.

I could solve that easily by keeping myself from going in too deep, or even writing in something like Simplified English which (I believe) has a limited amount of different words of around 2 or 3000 or so to keep things understandable, especially for the non-English speaking. But that would also squeeze out the fun of it for me as a writer a little bit too much.

So I don’t know what I will do. Maybe it would be a good practise for al these ‘Dutchies’, if I would publish all my columns first in English one day, teasing and maybe stimulating them a bit first, and then the next day running the same story, but then in Dutch. If I can just get them curious enough they maybe cannot wait and have a good reading practise in the process. 🙂

Another thing that is keeping me wondering just a little bit is, should I write in proper UK English (as I do in this first one in English), or maybe better using USA English or even being international and use some kind of mix of both to appeal to the largest number of potential readers?

I just don’t know. I would surely like to write some more in English, so that is what I most probably will do a bit more in the next at least 25 texts or so. Most probably supplying Dutch translations on the same day or one day later as well. I think it will be fun, especially to describe some typical Dutch (ab)normalities, for those who do not know. Maybe that special kind of texts won’t even translate into Dutch too well because Dutch natives maybe won’t derive the humor (which in that case most probably is on their expense…) from what’s being told.